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Formularies

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Formulary books are becoming antiques!

A formulary is a concise summary of medication guidelines regarding an illness or indication, agreed upon by health care professionals within a region. The formulary serves to guide the general practitioner or other health care staff when prescribing medication for a certain indication. Treatment options are listed by symptom, complaint or illness, and are divided into treatment steps and/or therapy options.

Directly put into practice

Medication management is an important factor in implementing guidelines. Formularies are not booklets that can be flicked through occasionally, but crucial links in the clinical process with many national, regional and local implications. Formularies are generally provided in the form of booklets, works of reference or websites. Prescriptor however, provides the opportunity to implement formularies into clinical practice. These formularies are directly integrated into the HIS (information system for GPs) and are therefore also implemented into the day-to-day activities of general practitioners. Prescriptor allows formularies to be applied in practice to individual patients, which is not the case with the more general paper formularies.

Local + regional

Several digital formularies are available in Prescriptor at the moment: national ones (NHG-EVS, ETAS) and regional ones (Nijmeegs formularium). The differences between these formularies lie mainly in the extent to which changes are pursued. The composition of review panels also plays a role, for example whether or not specialists and/or (hospital) pharmacists were involved. Local influences of and agreements between primary and secondary health care play an important role too. Local dynamics are likely to play a role in a limited number of indications within a pharmacotherapeutic (transmural) review, the FT(T)O. The above-mentioned factors make it all the more desirable to combine national and/or regional pharmacotherapeutic guidelines with local agreements.